


Meet Me in the Morning

by StellarRequiem



Category: Red vs. Blue
Genre: F/M, Falling In Love, Friends to Lovers, Partners to Lovers, Slow Burn, canon character death, some mild injury gore
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-02-24
Updated: 2017-07-25
Packaged: 2018-09-26 14:35:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 10
Words: 11,809
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9905129
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/StellarRequiem/pseuds/StellarRequiem
Summary: Carolina and Wash reestablish a working partnership on Chorus, only for Carolina’s world to collapse when Epsilon disassembles. She decides to honor his memory by finishing the mission they started together—a mission on which Washington joins her and, over time, allows their relationship to evolve.





	1. Recovery One

He grew up. They both have. It’s taken her awhile to realize it, but that is what’s had happened to him. She stares up at him from the floor, a drone of her mother's ghost cracking her mechanical knuckles in the background, watching him reach out to Carolina, reach out to _help_ her. To pick her up off the ground. Little Wash of the codpiece-grappling-hook offering to give _Agent Carolina_ the strength to stand. Wash who’d put a gun to her head to stand for _them,_ nevertheless coming after her to have her back.

The version of herself that lived through Freelancer would have been dumbstruck, might have been appalled, might have laughed, she doesn’t know. That girl lives in her somewhere, full of pride and need, but she's not sure anymore if she can hear her over the woman who's learned what she's learned, who's come here full of hate and betrayal and grief to do what she means to do, all with the help of an echo-- of her father and his sins chattering inside her head, telling her to take Wash’s hand.

She does.


	2. Fed and New

Walking away from Wash hadn’t been hard. It hadn’t been hard because she hadn't said _goodbye_. And in her mind, that had made it temporary.  It kept at bay the sinking reality of looking at him and knowing that this scared, paranoid, brave and broken young man was the only other human being left from the MOI’s top squad. The reality of looking and him and seeing the only person who remembered things like the day York lost his eye and what that looked like, and what her father said, and how it felt to see Texas work and know that something was changing for the worse. The only one who remembered what they were all like before the AI, _and_ after. He'd seemed like such a kid, then—reliable though he was—what with his skateboarding through the halls of the lower decks, with his ridiculous hair. But he'd _been_ there. And she wonders, sometimes, if he remembers her as differently as she remembers him.

When she sees him again—because this _is not goodbye—_ maybe she'll have the heart to ask him.

\--

Coming back is a fluid transition that runs, like most rivers, more smoothly on the surface than in the undertow beneath.

“So, you're not mad.”

“It seemed like Tucker had that covered,” he quips.

“Sure, if you're Epsilon.”

She can't see Wash through his visor, but she can tell that he's looking at her intently by how he holds his head—too stiff for his moderately relaxed posture.

“Wash.”

He sighs, his shoulders sinking.

“No,” he admits, “I'm not mad. But I am . . . exasperated. It would have been nice to know where you were going and how to contact you, given our situation. I mean, what the hell was I supposed to do if someone came to get us and you weren't back yet? The reds and blues were never really your problem, I guess, but-- well, never mind. It's in the past."

That stings. For some reason, that stings.

“It's not that I don’t care about them, Wash.” The words don’t feel enough.

“I know. That doesn’t mean they’re your problem, though, does it?”

His tone is ever so slightly bitter. Something tingles in her head at the sound.

**_C? I am the last person you should be asking about this, but I'm thinking you’re gonna need to give him a little more than that._ **

_No—really? I never would have guessed._ _Any other helpful suggestions, Epsilon?_

**_Yeah, I dunno . . . maybe elaborate on that a little? Just saying._ **

_I was being facetious. Besides, is now the time?_

**_Seeing as I'm pretty sure we'd all rather have something else to think about other than whatever doctor crazy is doing to that guy in there, I'm thinking this is a prime opportunity, yeah._ **

Carolina scowls at him, knowing he can feel the movement in her face. Epsilon ignores her. He remains a gently insistent pressure in her skull, waiting, expectant. It feels like a taunt somehow.

She inhales deeply, bracing herself as if to take a blow.

“I left them with you _because_ I care. I didn’t know what I’d be getting into—but I knew _you’d_ take care of them,” she explains.

Wash’s shoulders drop and his head moves back as if it will help him to take her in. She wonders what he’s looking for. Whatever it is that he finds, it’s enough to encourage him to come back at her a little less quietly than before. He looks at her with posture that is the picture of disbelief. His reply comes out deadpan, cold and dull through his radio.

“I'm _one guy_ versus a senile, bloodthirsty robo-phile, the world's most in-denial couple learning to move in together, a guy who thinks getting dropped off is a rescue, a marine who's been separated from his best friend _and_ his kid, and an emotionally volatile idiot with super-strength.”

“Who can all trust you.”

“. . . Right, sure.”

He’s so utterly unconvinced—

and she can’t even bring herself to resent it. She opens her mouth, only to close it again. Maybe it’s best—she reasons—to drop it.

In her head, Epsilon snorts.

**_Really? You’re going to back down from that?_ **

_What do you care?_

**I _don’t. But if you’re going to get all weird about it, I have to live with it. And I don’t want to._**

_I am_ not _being weird._

**_You kind of are._ **

_I am not!_

And just to show him, she throws five more words at Wash.

“I know _I_ trust you,” she blurts.

It’s only after she says it that she understands that there is something intensely meaningful in those words. Of course she trusts him. He ought to know that. But that doesn’t mean she’s ever said it aloud before, and if anything makes this conversation weird— _Happy, Epsilon?—_ it’s that.

Wash stiffens and then slackens, maybe surprised, maybe outright dumbstruck. She doesn’t know, and would rather not. The only thing _she_ wants is for him to say something and move on.

**_Congratulations, Sis. You’re officially worse at emotions than the computer living in your head._ **

_Oh, go standby, Epsilon._

**_Yeah, right. You’d go crazy with an empty head._ **

Carolina ignores him in favor of Wash, who stutters just a touch, a soft sound of wordless movements of his mouth over the radio before he clears his throat and manages to speak.

 “. . . Thanks. But for the record? I'd still rather not do that again.”

“Fair enough.”

Wash nods, hesitates, on the verge of turning away.

“I _am_ sorry, Wash,” she adds before he can go. He stops.

“Don't be,” he says. “. . . I'm just glad you got back ok.”

Carolina watches him go, now dumbstruck herself. Epsilon feels like he’s overclocking himself in the depths of her brain.

**_Wait wait wait, was_ he _worried about_ you?**

_. . . I think maybe he was._

Epsilon snorts. Carolina can’t quite bring herself to laugh with him, even internally.

\--

Wash suggests so naturally that the reds and blues leave him behind along with her to deal with the comm tower.

The freelancers alone against a war: it sound so frightfully like coming home.


	3. Interwar

“Where’s Wash?”

Sarge is the first to _ask_ , the others gathered around Tucker as Doctor Grey attends to the puncture in his gut, but Carolina is the first to _look_. Every inch of her body groans as she moves, and she grits her teeth. Locus hits hard. Really hard. It’s like fighting a tank hand-to-hand. Something is badly pinched in her spine, and it shoots fire down her legs as she makes her way to where her HUD says Wash should be. She can’t even feel her damaged knee anymore. There’s too much going on in her for it to register—pain, relief, fear, relief. Fear again.

Wash is facedown in the grass when she finds him.

Her back and legs burn her to ash from within as she struggles to run to him—She’d turn on her speed boosters, even for this short distance, if she wasn’t sure it would end with her on the ground and bleeding, too.

“Wash?”

She comes down hard on the ground beside him. He’s alive, her HUD can tell her that, but his vitals look weak at best. Somewhere inside of him, she’s sure that something is ruptured, that he’s bleeding. His breathing is too soft to register over the radio.

“ _Epsilon!”_

He’s there in an instant, buzzing along the wiring of the comm tower back to her head.

 _Not me,_ she’s shouting at him in her mind, _Wash! Does he still have a healing unit?_

**_Looks like it, but I don’t think it’s running right—_ **

_Then fix it._

**_C,_ ** _**he will NOT like me in there.**_

_I don’t care if he’s mad about it, Epsilon! Just help him!_

**_Ok, ok!  I’ll be right back—call the doc and radio for help. Tucker will be ok until it gets here._ **

**_. . .Not so sure about Wash._ **

It’s the last thing he says before he jumps into Wash’s head. When he returns, he says nothing at all.

_How is he?_

**_Not good. Is help on the way?_ **

_It’s coming all the way from Armonia. Will the healing unit get him stable enough to teleport him?_

**_. . . I don’t think I’d recommend it._ **

He’s holding out on her. She can feel it.

 _“_ Epsilon,” she snarls aloud. He appears in blue over her shoulder.

“He’s pretty messed up on the inside already, C. I wouldn’t try it. The best I can do is get the healing unit working again if it doesn’t keep running from here its own.”

“Won’t it work faster with you in there? Should you stay?”

“Not necessarily. If he were trying to run anything else alongside it, sure, but that and his vitals are about the only thing his armor _will_ run right now. Where’s the doctor?” He shivers at her side—his only indication of worry, it looks more like distraction than anything to the untrained eye.

Before Carolina can answer, Grey’s voice rings out, piercing, from behind them, and she comes running into view as fast as her armor will take her.

“Here! Get out of the way.”

She has to shove Carolina to get her to move as far away as she’d like.

\--

“Hey there. They said you were up.”

Carolina peeks her head around the curtain. Wash has been unconscious for two days, stretched across a gurney in an understaffed Armonia medical-building-turned-field-hospital. Half the patients are still wearing full armor to hold them together around their injuries, though Wash is down to his greaves, biofoam-ed and bandaged together from the waist up.

He groans as he turns to look at her, blinking bleary eyes. He always looks so tired, these days, and the circles of blood loss—like silhouettes of his eye sockets—only worsen the effect. Today, he looks less tired than dead.

“Hey ‘Lina,” he says.

“Can I come in?”

He blinks twice.

“Y—Sure.”

She steps inside and pulls up a chair beside him. Her knee cracks as she bends it. Epsilon, quiet without the aid of her helmet’s interface, if still ever-present, feels like a flash of irritation not her own. She can tell by the change in temperature around her knee, a sudden warmth, that he’s changed the target of her healing unit to that leg in particular. _I’d sooner you work on my back._

He fizzles, and her spine heats, too.

Wash is studying her with eyes that almost match his armor, a gray incongruent with his ethnicity. Half Vietnamese, she seems to remember him saying once, the eyes and freckles a contribution from a French Canadian mother. Eyes that look even paler than usual, though she doesn’t know how that could be, or remember when she last saw him without a helmet, besides. He looks different in so many ways: His buzzcut is growing out again, his roots dark beneath the bleach he still favors, for one.

He looks _older,_ for another.

“How are you doing?” she asks. “I’m sorry I wasn’t here sooner. I’ve been going over the manifest with the generals.”

“I’m alive. How are our odds?” He’s wheezing a little by the end of the sentence.

“If these armies ever learn to get along? Not terrible. At least for now, we have an advantage in numbers they weren’t counting on, and they didn’t exactly have time to take back all of the supplies they’ve provided these people with over the years.”

“And the hybrid weapons?”

“That’s the one thing that has us worried. That, and resupply. What we have now is all we can expect to see for a while.”

Wash sighs. The sound is weak, and he coughs once in the course of it.

“Great.”

“It’s possible we’ve seen worse,” she offers.

“It isn’t a hundred copies of Texas against us and the sim troopers, I guess.”

Carolina lets her smile break open at the corner of her mouth.

“No, that it’s not. And we don’t need jet packs for this one, either.”

Wash groans. Carolina grins.

“With all the hits we’ve taken to the head over the years,” he wheezes, “I’d kind of hoped one or both of us would manage to forget about that.”

“Even if we did, there’s always Epsilon. He holds onto _everything.”_ Epsilon sparks and glows at the back of her skull, and offers a memory of her—unnerving, given that it’s from her father’s perspective, via Alpha—at age five or six presiding over a garishly opulent doll wedding which she had decorated by drawing on several pages of the second draft of her father’s doctoral thesis. She grimaces despite herself. So does Wash.

“Believe me, I know.”

His tone is dark, for all its tiredness.

He rolls his eyes before looking at her again. When he does, he seems to hold her eyes for too long. She swallows hard.

“About Epsilon . . .” she says, staring at a spot on his pillow to avoid looking into his eyes, “when I found you, your healing unit wasn’t running.”

“Yeah, I think I saw that on my HUD right before realizing I was screwed and passed out. What . . . does that have to do with Epsilon?”

Epsilon simmers in her head. His voice is faint and shapeless when he speaks: **_You couldn’t have done this while I was with Tucker, or something?_**

_There’s no reason for you to ride around with Tucker while he’s stuck in a hospital bed, too._

**_Could have kept him company  . . ._ **

“Carolina?”

She comes back to herself and finds she’s biting down on her lip instead of talking. She clenches her jaw before forcing herself to speak, and her lip aches as her mouth moves over the words.

“I sent him in to fix it. He was only gone for a few seconds, but I thought you should know that it happened. And that it was my idea.”

Wash is too pale right now to blanch properly, but what he lacks in color to lose, he makes up for in his blank expression and terrified wide eyes, like a deer in the headlights of a tank. With a speed boost.

“I’m sorry, if there had been any other way, I wouldn’t have asked him to. But you were half dead when we found you. I didn’t know what else to do.”

She watches his Adam’s apple move as he swallows. He nods without speaking.

“Wash?”

He nods again, swallows again, breathes as deeply as four broken ribs will allow.

“I get it,” he says. “Besides, it’s not like there’s anything in there he hasn’t seen before.”

“You and I both know that’s not what’s scary about it.”

“ _You_ kn _—_ ,”

Whatever he was going to say, he stops himself before he can finish, studying her face instead.

Wash’s temples pop as his teeth grind.

It’s a while before he speaks again.

“Yeah, well,” he chokes, “‘therapist always said I was bad about repressing things anyway. I’ll just file this information away, if you don’t mind.”

Carolina can’t quite laugh—she can’t remember the last time she did, so perhaps that’s not surprising—but she does smile.

“You have a therapist? For what we’ve seen? I don’t suppose they’re taking new patients.”

Wash laughs softly. He almost never laughs anymore, and the sound, weak as it is, soft and staccato, almost precisely the pitch of his speaking voice, is pleasant. Perhaps because of its rarity, perhaps despite it.

“I’m afraid they’re not. Maybe Doctor Grey will have a look at us, instead.”

“No. Thank you.”

Wash grins. As weak as the gesture is, she’s glad for it, and returns it. There’s a beat of that—the easy effort of smiling—before he says any more.

“Anything else I should know?”

“Only that I suspect Caboose may be making you a get well present.”

“Please tell me it’s not mechanized.”

“I can’t make any promises.”

Wash groans again, and—albeit softly, albeit briefly—Carolina _does_ laugh. The look Wash gives her, startled and bright, makes her clear her throat instead, as if that could hide what’s happened, as if it should. Somewhere in her head, she can _feel_ Epsilon rolling his eyes.

**_You freelancers have so many issues._ **

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So, uh, sorry about the hiatus y'all. You know that thing where your depressive swing delves so low that it makes you feel like the void is eating you alive to think about having to extend the effort to open your laptop and then your guilt over not posting compounds it until you learn to hate everything you've ever created? Yes? No? (I hope no, it sucks and I wish it on no one. ) Anyway, that's been me for... a...while. I also have like, three jobs which is, how to put this--ABSOLUTE DONKEY BALLS? Or yknow, just, "tiring." So, that's what the hell happened over on my end, and here's hoping a mass chapter dump makes up for it at least a lil bit.


	4. Mission: Mercenaries

In the portal, Carolina watches them die. Each and every one of them in the same way. Taunting her as they go to their deaths, asking her to help, even though she’s rooted to the spot, screaming for them to stop. To do anything else. Shrieking at York that she’s sorry, that he was right, pleading with CT to tell them all the truth instead of sneaking off, ordering Wyoming and Florida to just get out now, together, before her father can send then on a fool’s errand. Begging Maine not to take Sigma, to give him to her instead, to let her fight him so that Maine and North and South and everyone, even _Tex_ , might live.

In the portal, she is going to die, too. Her enemy is a shapeless shadow who appears in black and sounds like a hundred voices speaking at once. Whispering about her past. When the freelancers are done dying and she has screamed herself raw, it comes for her, manifesting from the mist. And when it does, the reds and blues, Epsilon, Wash—they’re all there. Around her. Protecting her.

And every one of them dies, because she can't protect them, instead.

Wash goes down at her feet just as whatever force is holding her in place lets go, and she falls to her knees, screaming without sound. A rasping whisper of _No, no, no, please, no._

\--

“I can’t lose another family.”

She can feel her voice breaking as she says it, and she feels for a second how incredibly _tired_ she is, how hard it is to get the words out.

_Family._

Death.

The concept turns her stomach, squeezes her heart until it pops like a sad balloon doomed to drift back to earth, to be stepped on, maybe thrown away, maybe mourned by the memory of the child she was before her father stopped understanding that it’s the gesture—not the balloon itself—that’s important as a child grows older.

\--

She _will not_ lose them. She will not lose this planet. She will not lose to the likes of Locus and _Felix._ Of the two of them, he’s the one she has less of a vendetta against—he isn’t the one who nearly broke her spine—but he’s rapidly proving the more troubling. She’d drop him right now if it didn’t mean dropping Wash, too.

“ _DO. NOT. DROP HIM.”_

Wash is screaming at her from below as if she’d even consider such a thing.

_Not in a million years, Washington._

Assuming her armor doesn’t give out, that is. The grappling hook is designed to lift much larger objects than just her if need be. It’s not _that_ she worries about. What concerns her is the servos in her joints, the hold of her mag boots, fighting their swinging weight to keep her upright long enough to pull them up. Her only saving grace is the fact that Locus seems no more intent on sacrificing his partner than she is hers. He stands out of her reach, watching and waiting and wary.

She pulls until she feels twin points of impact against her feet. _Thank god for magboots._

**_Yeah, whatever, please don’t ever make me do that again._ **

**_. . . also, heads up on your right._ **

**_\--_ **

Wash knows how to duck. He probably doesn’t _need_ her to pull him down, but she does. The urge to protect him, to have his back—it's insatiably powerful. She keeps her hand on him at risk to herself until the platform has passed them, and a beat longer.

\--

Wash shouts in her ear unabashedly. _Oh, you big baby. I’ve got you, calm down._ If she weren’t so focused on the task at hand, she might tease him for it. But Wash has always come with his own soundtrack. It's part of his charm, making him seem younger and less certain than he is, his shrillness at odds with the strength of his grasp. As they fly through the air together, her arm around his waist and her hand on her grappling hook, he holds her in fear for his life, and the suffocating power of it is almost surprising. And the adrenaline between the two of them is, in its own way exhilarating.

And natural.

Fighting beside Wash like this, it's so. So easy. So normal. His oft-improvised precision and her rapid, aggressive style compliment each other, even if he is a little panicky.

 _Partners against partners,_ it occurs to her. If there was any doubt of their winning, that thought shatters it: Locus and Felix are fractured. Wash has already picked up on the cues that she'd missed and told her as much—and he's strategically reminding Locus of it at every available opportunity. But she and Wash—it feels like they’ve been side by side like this forever. It's not a particularly intimate partnership, she couldn’t say what makes him tick, what he loves, what he dreams about at night and if he shares her curse of nightmares, but they _are_ partners. Good ones. She doesn’t even have to sync with him. He's always already there.

 

 


	5. At What Cost?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> TW canon major character death
> 
> ALSO: THIS IS WHERE IT DIVERGES FROM RVB15 CANON. Because I technically wrote it, yknow, months ago and am just slow-posting.

The one nasty hit Carolina takes during the evac happens when she sees Tucker. She catches a glimpse of the helmet and skids to a stop, staring at him as he shimmers into full view for an instant. It's Wyoming's time dilation he's using—she blinks and Hardgrove’s soldiers’ guns are on the floor at Grif’s feet. She blinks again and the row of soldiers falling in behind the fallout of Doc’s rocket launcher are standing around a grenade.

 _Maine?_ It’s the first thing she thinks.

But it isn't. She knows by the fact that he doesn’t undo anything when Simmons goes down, a slug in the gap between the armor on his hip and the armor on his leg—Maine would have been able to fix that. This suit looks like him, but it’s missing pieces. Valuable pieces.

_No, of course it isn’t him._

She doesn’t get to take back the people she loses.

\--

“How is Epsilon running all of that?”

“I don’t know,” Tucker groans, “I've got like, twenty voices yelling at me in here at once, and none of them sound like Church. Where are you, asshole?”

He's clutching the back of his head. Most of them have taken hits, and Tucker is no exception, but the bleeding gash across his ribcage doesn't even seem to be registering for him.

It's Wash that pieces it together first.

“ _Oh no.”_

“What?” Carolina demands. “Epsilon? What's going on? Epsilon?”

Wash is looking at her. She can't read his eyes through his visor but they're trained on her, glued to her until the pelican glows green and no one has a choice but to look at the source. The sight prompts a hiccup in her brain. A processing error of her own.

“ _Delta?_ ”

She's heard Church talk to his memories as a way to parse his thoughts, but she's never seen him realize any of them in any way but momentary shifts in color. This is far more than that: the difference is deeper than color, now. It's in the fragment's voice, his bearing, the weapon he manifests holding.

Wash is looking at Tucker now, then Caboose. Back to her. He keeps coming back to her. Like he knows something she doesn't, like he's seeing what she can't, like he expects her to fall through the floor when she sees it, too.

“What the fuck?” Tucker grunts, still digging his fingers into his scalp. “Where the hell is Church?”

“If you are referring to the personality known as Epsilon,” Delta replies, “he is no longer here.”

“ _What?”_

“Carolina…” Wash’s voice is as soft as his presence at her side.   

“He has, however, relayed a message for all of you.”

“ _Delta_. Where is he?” her voice sounds like dull daggers.

“…The message will explain.”

\--

“No.”

“Carolina—”

“ _No—“_

Tucker is dumbstruck and silent. The reds have their eyes on him and Caboose. Wash has turned to Carolina with a hand out he doesn’t seem to know what to do with, it hovers between them, lost.

“Bring him back,” she commands. Her voice is shaking.

“Agent Carolina,” Delta begins.

“ _Don’t call me that.”_ That’s not her name to Church. To him she's C, she's _sis,_ she's—

“Put him back. Reassemble. I don’t care what you do, just, just _do it._ Fix him. Now.”

“Carolina,” it's Wash, so softly beside her. The floating hand drifts hesitantly toward her shoulder.

“Back off,” she snaps. “Delta, I swear to god. If you can't fix this—”

“I am afraid there is nothing to fix. The personality you're looking for no longer exists. Even an assemblage of these fragments would not constitute the ‘person’ you knew.”

Tucker is mumbling, now. Breaking down. _“What the fuck, what the fuck—_ why didn’t he—”

Carolina doesn't catch the rest, doesn’t hear him raise his voice and speak, so angry, so suddenly. Tragic rage in his dark eyes. So much betrayal in his face, and all of it at war with the agony of surviving because someone else did not. She doesn’t hear him because she is shrieking wordlessly as she lunges at Delta, as if attacking a hologram could help.

As if anything could help.

She runs into Wash’s arm.

He throws it out and snags her around her waist, wrapping his other arm around to hold her. The chin of his helmet clacks against her shoulder, and he speaks into her ear, so close she can almost hear the original words under the projection of the radio. Her name. “ _I'm sorry.”_ Her name.

He holds her steady until she collapses over is arm, breaking at the waist. She holds to his gauntlets like a hand rail.

“ _No,”_ she thinks she can hear herself screaming. “ _Don’t tell me that, don’t fucking tell me that, give him back—“_

“Carolina.”

His voice is so gentle, so aching on her behalf, that she hates him.

“Get off of me, Washington,” she spits, and shoves her elbow into his face. He stumbles backward, releasing her as he goes, trailing away except for his fingertips still grazing her arm.

There is a storage compartment along one wall of the pelican—a tiny room. It's the only place to escape to.

Carolina charges for it before the tears can come.

\--

York.

She last cried like this for York.

His was the one death from Freelancer too personal to suffer with stoicism, as a steel-faced soldier. Like Epsilon, she hadn't been there for him when he went.

She shrieks and hurls her helmet against the wall of the small closet before going to her knees. Her gloved palms are rough against her cheeks, the Kevlar merciless. She cries until her chest forgets, around the hiccupping of sobs, what it means to breathe.

\--

It’s Wash that comes for her. She can hear him outside, “ _No, let me get her.”_

He's always who comes to get her.

He edges into the room, sans helmet. He has such tired eyes, wary in ways that have nothing to do with sleep or lack thereof. She meets them once before looking away.

“Carolina?”

She doesn’t tell him to leave. She can't speak to do so, and doesn't know if she wants to or not. She doesn’t know anything about herself at this moment, so much shock and grief and _no, not you, too, not you,_ boiling over inside her that all she feels is a hazy, nebulous, omnipresent ache.

Wash gingerly settles on the floor beside her, with his back to the same wall. They have to sit with their knees bent in the small space.

He breathes deeply, watching her sideways.

“I came to help you get out of here,” he says. “But I thought maybe you should see this, first.”

He hands her a chip. A regular memory chip, large enough to fit into a slot in her helmet.

She looks up at him, hoping the question her raw throat can't speak is in her eyes. He sees it.

“It's a message,” he answers. He's so hesitant. So uncomfortable. “ . . . From Epsilon. He left one for all of us. Delta copied this one for you.”

“I can't look at that,” she chokes.

“. . . I know. But I wanted you to know you had it.”

He cautiously reaches for her hand, turning it over to set the chip in her palm.

“I'm,” he breathes, “I'm so sorry. I know—”

“What do you know?” the words come out so harsh, and she can see him flinch. It's subtle, but she sees it.

And it makes her feel like a monster.

But this is not the Wash she and her friends had once wounded—looking back, the way they’d talked to him, the way she—

This Wash steels himself in an instant, hardens himself enough to be kind. To take care of her. Because that's who he is, now.

“I know you loved him, and I know it hurts. I don’t . . . I don't really know how to help with something like this. But I understand that much.”

She doesn’t want to start crying again, and it’s hard to say whether his words or the reality they recall that sets her off, but she feels her face crinkle, and she finds herself under his arm, head against his chest piece, crying what few tears she has left, before she even decides to move. Wash flinches, stiffens, but she doesn't care. She hasn’t reached out to anyone for anything more than a hand to help her up in so long, but now it’s all she has left that she can do.

Wash settles his arm around her shoulders, and holds her loosely while she mourns.

 

 


	6. Will and Testament

It takes Wash less time than it takes Carolina to listen to his message. With Armonia in ruins, the former Freelancer soldiers have taken up a wing of crew quarters on the half of their ship still resting at Bravo, and the walls between the rooms are thin. With her head resting against the one by her bed, she can hear faint indications of what's transpiring in the Blues’ and Wash’s room. The fights. The screaming from Tucker, spat in the face of Caboose's remarkable resiliency, Wash’s voice struggling to stay steady as he warns one to back down and one to be patient. Like all things, Caboose deals with loss immediately and forthrightly, and begrudges Church nothing. He grieves by befriending the fragments now inhabiting the cast-aside suit, introducing Theta to Freckles, frustrating an uncharacteristically quiet Sigma—Caboose has no demons for him to turn on him. His wants are too simple for deviousness. Omega is the only one forbidden from interacting with him, by Wash’s uncertain authority.

She knows Wash has opened his message because this, too, she overhears. She catches a mumbled sound, the words indistinct but the cadence familiar. _Church?_

Her heart shivers up into her throat in the second it takes her brain to catch up to what she must really be hearing. A muffled, awkward address:

_Uh, Hey there, Washington . . ._

She doesn't listen to the rest.

\--

“What did he say to you?”

Wash nearly drops the cup of coffee he's holding. They're going over schematics for making a proper settlement out of a nearby base—they haven't left Chorus, yet, though it’s been weeks since the end of the war. The UNSC wants everyone to stay put, for one thing, and by this time, the families of those who still have them have come to Chorus, too, so there isn’t much reason to leave. Grif's sister narrowly avoided the death sentence of becoming Carolina's roommate by becoming Doctor Grey's new favorite subject. Lavernius Tucker Jr. Has arrived with a small entourage of alien cultural and technological envoys who seem disappointed—as far as the humans around her can tell—that “Santa” supports Chorus’ claim to ownership over the relics there, though he unsubtly encourages his people's decedents be permitted to come and go freely from the temples.

In the midst of all of this, Carolina is drowning.

“Who?” Wash stutters.

“You know who. What'd he say to you?”

Wash shifts from foot to foot, looking intently at the schematics, though she doubts he's seeing them.

“He told me . . . Mostly he told me to keep an eye on the Blue's.”

“He made you team leader.”

“Uh, not exactly. He more . . . wanted me to keep the team leader sane.”

“Tucker is still mad at him.”

“He'll get past it . . . I think he blames himself for taking the suit in the first place.”

“If he hadn't, they'd probably be dead.” She forces strength into the words. Wash’s helmet cocks in her direction. _Because we didn’t get there in time._

“Yeah, well, he's not ready to digest that yet. Right now—”

“He just feels like he left us.”

Wash looks at her, and sighs. His shoulders slump, and he sets his coffee down.

“You know that isn't how it happened, Carolina.”

“I know. We're the ones that left him.”

“Carolina—”

“We should have been there. _I should have been there._ ”

Wash shifts, anxious, sighing instead of speaking, fidgeting where he stands. He doesn’t try to touch her, but the same uncertainty of how to proceed that she remembers from his hesitant embrace is there in his posture now.

“He,” he says very softly, “said you might feel that way.”

“And he what, told you to tell me I’m wrong?”

“His exact words were ‘don’t let her beat herself up. She doesn't deserve it.’”

Words like a punch in the gut.

Because that is, of course, exactly how he’d have put it.

All Carolina can do for a moment is stare. There is so little delicacy, so much frankness, exactness in the words. Wash clears his throat. Carolina tries to speak, and can't.

“We were where Kimball needed us,” Wash says quietly, when the silence draws on too long. “We had no way of knowing that what happened would happen. You made the right call. You were always the leader for a reason, Carolina, you-- It was a _good call._ It's the best one you could have made knowing what you did. None of this is your fault. None of it.”

“Then who's is it, Wash?”

She wants to shout but it comes out a whisper.

“Hardgrove’s,” he growls. “Everything that’s happened to us since that ship went down was because of what he did here. And because of Epsilon, he's never going to hurt anyone on this planet or any other again.”

“Somehow that doesn’t help.” She scoffs, the half-laugh sound of dismissal that accompanies it rough, too rough. Underneath the anger, her own voice sounds so broken.

\--

When Carolina listens to her message, she's alone, far outside of the canyon. Chorus has no moon, but the days are long, and a faint blue glow still rests along the horizon ahead of her. She settles on a rock outcropping, breathing in the silent night, the breeze tearing at her too-long hair, helmet in one hand, the chip in the other.

_You can do this._

_You have to do this._

The message begins by projecting a hologram, and she fears her heart might break for good.

\--

“ _Hey, Sis. Look, I don’t know when you're going to get around to listening to this. I don’t know if you're going to be more upset with **me** when you do, or yourself. I hope it’s the former. But either way, I know there are some things I need you to hear. You can probably guess the first one:_

_“This **isn't your fault**. And there was nothing we could have done differently that wouldn't have cost us a lot more than me—I'm looking at the math, C. Every possible scenario.  There's maybe, maybe one thing we could have done differently that wouldn't have cost as many lives as it saved, and that—don’t worry about what that was. Because it's on me, not you guys. And I don’t think I’d have done it any differently if were being honest._

_“Because, **if** were being honest . . . something like this was going to happen sooner or later, anyway. And if it had to happen—I'd rather it be in a way where I could leave something behind that's worthwhile.  Like all of you. And if I go now, if I go this way, I know that you're all going to be ok. Maybe not right now, but you will be._

_“Which brings me to the second thing . . ._

_“I know you hate goodbyes. I know goodbye makes things permanent, and that you hate that. Because, well—that’s something you got from both your parents. You don’t believe in hopeless situations. You're way, way too stubborn for that._

_“But this just is not  one of those things you can fix. I don’t . . . I don't want to be brought back from this. If you did—I don’t think it’d still be **me**. And that means I owe you something that, right now, you're not going to want to hear: The truth. _ _That this is one of those impossible things. And I’m sorry._

_“I know that all your life people have been leaving. Allison—she left one day and didn’t get to come back. Your dad? Our dad? He—I don’t need to tell you about him. But it’s not just them. It's the freelancers. It's York, waiting too long to tell you why he was on Tex’s side. It's Connie. It's Maine becoming the Meta without stopping to tell you he needed help. And while there were a lot of reasons those things played out the way they did—_

_“You’ve lived through so much loss, and you should know—you should know there's more to it than that._

_“C, you are the—and I'm crap at this emotions thing so bear with me—but you are so smart, and brave, maybe reckless. Sure, but you never back down, and that counts for more than you know. There isn't a decent person in the galaxy you wouldn't give anything to protect because you . . . **care** so much. And the people that know you, they love you for it . . . and if there's a digital heaven, or whatever, or if any part of me lives in the fragments I’m leaving behind— you’re the one I'll miss the most._

_“So you deserve to hear it. Just once: Goodbye, Carolina._

_Have a great life for me, ok?_

_. . . ok.”_

\--

 

He wasn’t good at goodbyes **.** Just like her.

It takes her a long while, replaying and replaying the recording until it feels unreal, until the repetition of it drives home the reality that he cannot add more, that it will not change, that this is how a goodbye works: It's a permission to let go.

The last time she listens through it, with a voice raw and so soft it's nearly soundless, she whispers a single word back to him before Epsilon’s likeness blinks out.


	7. Backwards Homecoming

“You're just going to _leave_?”

Tucker's resentment is hollow. She knows he doesn't have any expectation of her, and it might be admiration that fuels his tone. He never asked to be a leader. But here he is.

“ _Tucker_ ,” Caboose says, endeavoring to be chastising, “be nice to Agent Carolina. Sometimes, people need to take breaks, and that is ok.”

Tucker mutters something to himself before adding:

“Whatever. Good luck finding yourself, or whatever.”

“I'm not ‘finding myself,’” Carolina retorts, “I'm finishing what Epsilon and I started. I owe him that.”

“You really don't,” Tucker says. There is no vitriol in the words, none that registers in his face, anyway, in his averted, sympathetic eyes. “But you do you.”

That’s telling the Blues.

The Reds are easier.

“Sounds like work,” Grif says. “I hope you're not asking us to come.”

“Don’t worry, I’m not.”

“Oh thank god,” Simmons murmurs, the words carried out on an breath almost as if they’d simply floated out of his chest without his meaning to say them. Donut seems sad to see her go, warns her to take better care of her hair this time—bemoans her split ends, chastises her about wearing a helmet so often. Sarge grumbles something about being careful, about not needing to be careful, about making sure she comes back. “If the blues are just drivin’ you crazy, you can always join the true heroes of the Red Army.”

“Thanks, but no thanks.”

That’s the Reds.

It might be Sarge who tells Wash, it might be Caboose. She never finds out. But he comes to her before she can come to him, however it was he knew to do it.

“You're leaving.”

“I have to. Wash, I can't keep sitting here on my thumbs. I can do more, and I should, and—”

“And you want to finish this for Epsilon, I know. You two spent a lot of time together recovering Freelancer tech. It makes sense to honor him by finding the rest.”

“I'm glad you think so.”

A beat of silence hangs between them, weighing on the air.

“Will you be ok . . .” she ventures.

“I'll be fine. I'm more worried about you.”

Wash is so succinct, so formal, so crisp in the way he speaks sometimes that it’s nearly cutting. It definitely cuts her, now, because of the _genuineness_ of it. Little “David” Washington, looking out for Carolina. Grown up, seasoned, slow-healing Wash, making himself into a net to catch her. She can feel him weaving it, and see the knitting action in his brows.

“I'll be fine.”

“You usually are. But if you're not—Working alone is never a great idea, Carolina.”

“I’ve done it before,” albeit briefly. When all of her body still ached from Maine, from the cliff, from the emptiness in her head where Eta and Iota so briefly resided. “Besides, I think this is something _need_ to do on my own.”

“Yeah, ok. But, call us when you need us. No matter what.”

Carolina cracks a tired smile.

“Are you telling me what to do?”

Wash shrugs.

“Just doing my part, Boss. But. Seriously. If you need us—”

“I know you'll be there.”

\--

Wash drives her out to the shuttle lot.

“Be careful,” he warns her as they come to a stop, watching her as she traces the trajectory of shuttles moving skyward. She can feel the brightness of his ever-tired eyes on her face.

“Ok, Mom.”

“Really?”

“I do have a sense of humor, you know.”

“Right. Yeah, I’m sure you do.”

She glares at him. He smiles a little. At the corner of his mouth.

That’s what makes her do it.

Carolina surges over the gearshift, over the space between them, over years of hierarchy and distance, over caution or propriety or rank or her own emotional inaccessibility, to throw her arms around his neck. Wash goes stiff as a railroad spike.

“Thanks, Wash,” she murmurs in his ear. His cheek on hers is warm with Chorus’ gentle sun.

She can hear his teeth clack shut, a dropped jaw closing. _You dork,_ she thinks, so much affection in her own internal monologue that it threatens to bubble into a laugh, or at least a smile, despite the strange gravity of the moment. Wash’s hands come up to meet her, one on her shoulders, across the scar Felix once burned into her, like a ridgeline under her tank-top. Her armor is packed in the footlocker at her feet.

His other hand comes to rest across the back of her skull, trading sun-stolen heat with her hair.

“Any time,” he says awkwardly. All his solidity is in his touch.

“Yeah, I know,” she says, as she pulls away, mourning already the loss of that kind of contact, the kiss of those hands on her and the way they hold, steady and gentle, a little careful, a little bewildered, but very determined. Vary safe. The way home would feel if it could reach out and brush her skin—imperfect and full of memory and meaning but secure, but warm, but good. Maybe Wash always hugged like that, maybe he's grown into it. She's not sure which is more confusing. Or which is sadder.

She thinks about that a little too hard—holding to this one abstract concept to drown out so much else—until she is safely aboard the ship she’s been given, until she's plotting coordinates, until space stretches out before her, the first of many locations where twice-stolen  equipment might have been sold after ships and _people_ returned to Chorus, blinking on her display.


	8. Mission: Legacy

She can do this, she knows she can do this. It's four guys watching a ship full of goods—all she needs to do is take out four guys, and take the ship, with the goods. And fly fast enough to get away. And then turn the whole thing over to the UNSC.       

Easy.

Epsilon would have asked her what she was so wound up about.   She wouldn’t have been able to say. It's an easy, easy job. Simple.   It doesn’t take thorough analysis to know how to execute it, doesn't take constant internal feedback, doesn't need a check and balance against her every thought, her every motion, doesn’t take calculation and recalculation and adjustment.  And even if it did, she knows how to improvise. And even if it did, she used to do everything alone, anyway.

\--

“ _Hah,_ got it. Come on, E—“

Victory dies on her tongue.

\--

Her third raid is the one that reminds her, all at once, of how easy it is to brush hands with  _failing._ She's fighting, she's running, a whirlwind of guns with only her speed to aid her—all she needs—and three of them go down in a second, and this is easy, this is Freelancer-easy—

And then there are two more dots on her motion tracker and she can't cover her own six and maybe she calls for Epsilon or maybe she calls for Wash or York or South but whoever it is doesn’t come and she's still processing that as she falls to the floor.

\--

Playing dead doesn't suit her, but it works. The figure that comes to put a good measure bullet in her head gets one in theirs, and in the end, she walks out with her prize in hand, her pride dragging broken at her feet.

\--

The first time she really, _truly_ fails leaves her lying in a heap, bleeding from her side, Texas’ ghost gloating at her as she fades in and out of consciousness.

“ _How could you be based on her?”_ Carolina whispers, soundless, hateful words.

To her horror, Texas’ entire demeanor shifts. Her voice softens, her shoulders slacken.

_“I'm just how he remembered her, kid.”_

Carolina can't be certain whose heart—Tex’s stolen one, or her own—those words hurt more.

\--

“Carolina. _Carolina!”_

“ _Epsilon?”_

Her voice is so weak she isn’t sure if she’s speaking aloud. The room is full of an ambient glow—more white than blue. A dark room, indistinct, except for that not-blue.

“More or less. C, look, you’ve got to get up, ok? Don’t go to sleep.”

“How are you . . . ?”

“Is that important?” Texas. _Why is she here?_ Texas, with an echo of a more familiar voice somewhere in her undertones. “Come on kid, listen to Church.”

“I’m so tired, Epsilon.”

“I know. But you’ve got to get up. You’re hurt. You’re bleeding. You need to get help.”

“But I’m alone.”

The room is so dark. She is so, so cold.

“No, you’re not. I’m here. Besides, since when does Agent Carolina need help?”

“ _Always.”_

Memory breaks open in her head, taking over her blurry vision, swimming across the dark. Her team at her back, or in her dust. Epsilon over her shoulder. Wash’s hand, _get up._ Wash’s hand, coming after her. Wash’s hand.

“I was wrong. I can’t do this. I don’t know how to be alone, Church . . .”

“You’ve seen worse than this,” Texas chides. “I’d know.”

“But I couldn’t beat you. I couldn’t . . .”

“You can beat _this_.” Church again _._ “Come on, stay with me. How can you get help?”

“ . . . Wash. The Reds and Blues. They’re on Chorus.”

“Can you radio them?”

“From the ship.”

Church exhales heavily. A being without breath, he offers no warmth, only light in her increasing cold. Her closing dark. Her lids are so _heavy_ in such dark—

Somehow, she’s not sure they’re actually open.

“Hey, hey, Carolina! Come on, what are we not doing?”

“Sleeping.”

“Exactly. What’s next? Talk me through it. Where’s your ship?”

“Outside. It’s too far.”

“Carolina, don’t you dare give up. No it isn’t. Tell me how you can get to it.”

“. . . The healing unit. There’s epinephrine—”

“Good, that’s good. But it will make you bleed faster. You have to close it up, ok? Do you know where it hurts?”

“Everywhere.”

“Find the blood, Carolina.” Tex, so soft, so unlike her. The Tex that’s like Mom. A glow without form, dark on dark so _dark . . ._ “where is it coming from?”

“ . . . Here. I think it’s here.” Her arm is heavy, like her eyelids. Dead and numb, her fingers frozen.

“Good girl. Good job," still Texas. "Now come on—team leader, you know field medicine. How do you get it to stop?”

“Biofoam.”

“Well, let’s see that, then. Come on, show me up. I never got a real body. Do something I can’t do. Go on, show me up.”

“It’s too hard . . .”

“Aw, come on. No it isn’t. You can do this in your sleep. If this was a team mate, what would you do?” Tex coaxes, Tex ribs. Carolina fumbles over the canister.

“Great job, Sis,” Church is muttering, the glow so far, so close. “Just like that. You can do it.”

_I don’t know if I can . . ._

Her hands are so clumsy. She’s so numb already—she can’t feel the analgeisic. Can’t tell by feel if she’s patched the hole in her body. Can’t trust her swimming vision to confirm what her hands _can_ still sense.

“Good job, kid.”

She collapses from her half-sitting position, the canister falling from her hand.

“Stay with me, C. What’s next?”

“The healing unit.”

“Exactly.”

“It isn’t running, it didn’t start . . .”

“You can start it. Just tell it to start. It’s part of your armor, ok? It’s easy.”

“. . . You always ran it . . .”

“Hey, York had it before he had Delta. It saved Wash twice. It’ll do fine. You just have to start it. Carolina? Carolina—come on, sis, just tell it to run, just tell it—”

_Help, Epsilon._

_I need you to help . . ._

_"_ Carolina!”

\--

“This is . . .” so little air, so little vision, is the radio on? _Can anyone hear me?_ “Agent Carolina of Project Freelancer. Free agent of Chorus. I need evac from these coordinates. Need medical assistance, please respond.”

Static, static,

“Please respond. This is . . . agent . . . Carolina . . . I need evac . . .”

Static—

“Please . . .”

She slides down the control panel. _Is it still listening?_ She can’t stop saying it, over and over until her voice grows distant, drifts away from her, or she drifts away from it, into the dark.

“This is Agent Carolina, please respond . . .”

She dreams a voice in the static. ‘ _Lina!_

“This is Agent Carolina, please respond.”

_We read you, we’re coming. Do you read me?_

“This is Agent Carolina, please . . .”

Such quiet dark. _Carolina!_ Only dreaming. Static and static and dark.

“Please respond.”

\--

_‘Lina! Grey, get in here. She’s here._

Weight in the dark. Then loss of it—a shift in gravity, her head up, floating—

_Carolina? We’re here. Just hold on. We’re here._

_I’ve got you._

_Just hold on._

 

 


	9. Reset

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> What no I'm not posting out of sheer denial for recent canon events that would be not at all (exactly, 100%) something I would do
> 
> anyway here's a reasonably happy chapter

\--

Washington is beside her when she wakes up.

“’ _Lina!_ ”

She groans, reluctant to respond to what must be another dying-dream, just radio static shaped like this new shorthand for her name. Maybe she’s just not hearing all of it.

It’s the presence of a hand, warm on hers and uneven with the texture of a glove, that makes her realize that her slow-blinking eyes aren’t an illusion, nor is the white light around her the unasked for embrace of death. It’s just the glare of light on too much white: walls, sheets, hospital gown. Wash is a dark spot so jarring against all that whiteness that he’s momentarily bewildering to the eye, and she has to blink a little faster just to make sense of him.

“Wash?”

“Yeah!,” too loud. “Uh-yeah. Hey. How do you feel?” Quieter.

“Like something chewed me up and spit me back out. How did you find me?”

Wash’s eyebrows knit together, a frown catching the corner of his mouth while he searches her face.

“You called us from your ship. Do you not remember?”

“. . . I’m not sure. It’s foggy, I—”

_I heard Epsilon._

_No_ — _he sounded wrong._ _That’s not how he talks . . ._

 _I heard_ Alpha _._

_And Beta._

Instinctively, she tries to reach behind her head to feel for the scars of her AI, only to be stopped short by a shooting pain down her side. She drops the arm.

“Why does my side hurt? I do remember getting shot, _in the gut_.”

Wash’s worried expression shifts, his eyes wandering to her ribcage, then almost sheepishly back to her face.

“That’s one of the surgical incisions. You—”

“ _One of?”_

“Yeah. One in your side because, I guess, it was easier to get at some of the frag that way, but most of it Grey had to go through your abdomen . . .” his voice shifts from uncomfortable—a struggle to find the right tone for this discussion—to heavy as he speaks, “It was bad, Carolina. Really bad. Even with the healing unit, you were barely there when we found you.”

“We? You and Grey, right? Or did I imagine that?”

A fraction of the tension drains out of his face. “You had that right. Good to know your brain must have made it out more or less ok.”

“Why wouldn’t it have?”

“Because you stopped breathing for nearly a minute.”

He fixes her eyes with his, an unrelenting and saddened stare that’s almost pleading, as grave as his tone. There’s something in them that he isn’t saying. For the first time, she tries take more of him in than his face.

Wash is covered in blood.

He tracks her gaze, and tenses.

“Is that all mine?” she asks. It comes out much weaker than she’d like. Really, she’s more incredulous than anything. Achy through a fog of painkillers and stiff as if she’s been lying exactly like this, in this gurney, for a year, with the pinching pain of IVs in both her arm and hand, she now feels nevertheless very, very much alive, and plenty aware of her own desperately weakened body. That sense of fading out feels now like a distant dream. If there weren’t so much evidence of damage on every inch of her and smeared on Wash’s armor, she’d believe that’s all it was.

 _But I saw Church._ All of Church, with that echo of Epsilon somewhere in him.

“Yeah,” Wash answers quietly. “That’s all yours. Even with the healing unit. I . . .” his quiet turns nearly to silence that she has to strain to hear, “we thought we might actually lose you. Grey was terrified. She didn’t say it, but  . . .”

“You’re telling me that I almost died.”

He looks at her with visible tension in his throat, a lump she imagines she can see, moving under the warmth of his skin. His hand, even gloved, feels like a space heater on hers—he hasn’t pulled it away yet.

Carolina looks away from him, to the ceiling, before closing her eyes.

“I fucked up,” she breathes. “Wash, I fucked up . . . _everything_. It never should have happened like that.”

“But it did.”

She’s surprised by the sudden steel in his voice, and turns her spinning head to look at him again.

“That was way too close,” he says.

“Are you lecturing me, Washington?”

“Maybe. Tell me you’re not going back out there.”

Carolina takes stock of her broken body, the cold of blood loss and the everywhere ache and the muscles too weak to want to move, and says:

“Not any time soon.”

“That’s not good enough.”

“Don’t tell me what to do.”

“You can do whatever you want,” his voice is firm without a trace of anger, though his face is every bit as twisted by furrows and tension as it would be if he were furious, “but if you go back out there, you’re not doing it alone.”

His mouth moves as if to say more, but it catches in his throat, and he has to breathe deep before he can push the words out, every ounce of strength, every bit of sternness and determination drained out of them, leaving nothing in his tone but quiet agony.

“I am not burying you, Carolina. I won’t do it.”

She has to look away from the heart-piercing mix of grief and fear and hurt in his eyes.

Staring at the blankness of the ceiling, she flexes her tired arm enough to flip her hand over beneath his, bringing them palm to palm, her fingers slipping clumsily through his. She squeezes them as hard as she can, which, in her state, isn’t hard at all.

It’s a long time before, maybe whispered, maybe it’s even in her head, she’s able to say:

“You won’t have to.”

\--

It’s only after he leaves to make space for Doctor Grey that Carolina understands how long she’s been out. 17 hours, Grey chides, such clear evidence that she’s come way too close to the edge of living. Again.

_At least this time I didn’t have to fall off of anything._

All that really sticks in Carolina’s mind through all Grey’s chatter, though, is the blood on Wash’s armor. Living in armor isn’t a strange concept to anyone connected to PFL, but to leave it a mess means to leave it, period.  She wonders, as Grey talks, how long he’d been there holding her hand.

\--

_He’s not like York._

It wasn’t a comparison that she’d meant to make in the first place, and now it won’t leave her alone, and she’s wishing with a hole in her heart for Epsilon’s answer of evidence and sarcasm and borrowed memories to support the thought: _It’s not like York._

For one thing, Washington has never been in love with her. _Right?_

 _RIGHT. He calls you_ boss, _Carolina Church: don’t be stupid._

For another, she has never been in love with Washington. He’s never made her stomach flutter up into her throat. He’s never made her wonder about a life after the military, about what happens when a war ends, about kids, about  . . . fun.

_Well, maybe that part._

And more than anything, there’s the distance: York was there when she woke up with an AI headache and her mother’s name screaming through her head. She’d had to tell him off, from time to time, for looking over her shoulder when he didn’t need to worry for her, and shouldn’t.

Wash was there with his hand on hers when she was near _death._ And he doesn’t hover, he never has. He’s protested, defied, questioned, and guided, but he knows her breaking points and barriers and he stays well away from them. He’s her teammate, her partner, not doting. He has no proclivity for babysitting.

He’s not like York.

If she loves him, it’s for being her dearest friend left in the world—

Carolina wonders how long, exactly, that's been the case.

\--

“You were serious about coming with me.” It’s not a question, though she raises her eyebrows as if it were. Carolina relaxes against the stack of weapons lockers beside her, slinging an arm over them, the pulling feeling of her incision is finally gone—healed away. She’s still cautious with the movement, however, the memory of that sensation of ripping still fresh in her mind.

Wash maintains his defiant posture, helmet under his arm, free hand closed in a gentle fist at his side.

“Dead serious.”

“What if I say no?”

“Then you’ll have to deal with me following you around.”

Carolina allows herself a little scowl. “You’re telling me my options are bring you with me, or have you stalk me?”

Wash blinks once, as if the motion could save his determined façade, but his mild blanching gives him away, as does his sputtered response.

“I—well—when you put it like that it sounds creepy.”

“Yeah,” she says, stretching out the word. She can almost _see_ him kicking himself. She bites the inside of her cheek to suppress her laugh.

“I’ll take the Reds and Blues,” he threatens, recovering himself and standing a little taller, lifts his head a little higher, lets his mouth creep a little closer to a smile, “that’s not stalking, that’s just teamwork.”

“Team _stalking_ , you mean.”

“Team rescue and recovery. We’ll go full ‘Saving Private Ryan,’ don’t temp me.”

“You and your ancient movies,” she says, rolling her eyes. But that laugh is threatening her again. She sighs and shakes her head.

“Ok, what happens if I say yes?”

“Then you tell me which box to move first, and we get this bird off the ground, Boss.”

“You’re not even going to ask me where we’re heading first?”

“Explain on the way. I’m a good listener.”

And then there’s the smile. The barely smile of a man who’s come home from the war, but wouldn’t mind a bit of fun (however ridiculous that might turn out to be, depending on the number of vehicles involved), who’d hate to let that sharpshooting skill to waste.

 _That’d be unacceptable._ She smiles to herself, and points to the tower of lockers she’s leaning on.

“Start with that one.”

 

 


	10. Heart to Hearts

It’s the easiest thing in the universe.

Wash has always been a perfect partner—well, after Freelancer, back then she’d been cocky and he’d just been _young—_ and if that hadn’t been clicking into place in her head before, it is now. _Sync_ is just a cue. He knows what she’s doing and where she’s going, and if he isn’t at her back, it’s because he’s paving her way. And Carolina—for Carolina fighting with Wash is an exercise in banter. Not so much with words—he’s a talker in a fight, not her—but with gestures. A shot from him, a kick from her, a knife sailing over her shoulder to skewer some enemy behind her met with the man who has him cornered going down hard on the kneecap her foot has shattered. And to say it’s _fun_ seems somehow twisted when everything around her is tooth and nail blood and sweat and shouting and begging and searching, some fights yielding results, some only the sounds of her frustration and Wash’s perceptively awkward consolation, but it _is_ fun to fight with him. Because it’s so simple. Because it’s so—

It’s familiar.

And sometimes, it’s even funny.

“No. I am done with grappling hooks.”

“How about a jet pack?”

“. . .  You have got to be kidding me.”

He doesn’t always mean to make her smile, but it happens all the time.

\--

The rhythm they settle into is a slow and easy one. They raid, they research, they report, they raid again. More of their time is spent hopping from world to world, sometimes holed up in hotel rooms, sometimes on their little ship for two, than actually fighting. If those violent encounters are the highlights, then the lowlights—the _soft_ light of moments that are quietly important—are the talks. The nights in some backwater world’s backwater hotel unravelling each other, learning things like how Wash actually ended up a Freelancer, about the side of him she’s so rarely seen.

He’s good at bottling up his righteous anger because it burns like something boiling, hotter and hotter but ever-still until all at once it ruptures over the sides of him and lands him in the kind of situations that people like Aidan Price could extort. That’s what he reveals. His is the exact antithesis of her quick, personal anger.

Perhaps it’s not surprising they work as well as they do.

The compare rage and they compare joy and they compare regret. She learns, also, that of all his PFL kills, the shots that weigh on him the most, to this day, are two quick pulls of the trigger at point blank range in a sunny valley at the foot of a concrete base, though he knows that no one, least of all her, is judging him for it. She doesn’t need to explain that much. He knows. He looks into her face with those earnest, weary, mischievous eyes, and she can see everything she would have told him to reassure him already there, right alongside every futile sentence he could possibly offer her for her own guilt.

Wash doesn’t need her to explain that her regrets begin and end with her father and all the broken ways she tried to love him, but she tells him about it anyway, little by little, night by night, until nightmares demand confirmation of what they have never said in so many words that he knows. _My father,_ she always says. Or _The Director._ Never one and the same. The way she says it, one could imagine they were two different people. But they weren't. That’s the truth that takes the longest to tell.

\--

Carolina jolts awake in her seat in the cockpit. Wash is flying the ship on autopilot, a tablet open in his lap, exactly how she left him: She can’t have been asleep for more than twenty, maybe thirty minutes. It feels like a lifetime. There are things in her head that are hard to blink away and which she never particularly wanted to re-live. That much must be evident on her face—

 _Or you’re back to talking in your sleep._ She hasn’t done that since she was twelve, but somehow, it wouldn’t surprise her. Epsilon used to pick on her for how very near to it she sometimes used to come.

**_So do I wanna know what that dream was about or . . .?_ **

_That’s none of your business, Epsilon._

**_Right, so, don’t wanna. Got it._ **

Wash doesn’t tease, though, unlike Epsilon. He knows nightmares too well for that.

“AI, Freelancer, Chorus, or family?” he asks, a weary heaviness in his eyes and the slope of his thick brows.

“AI . . . It was Sigma. I have these dreams sometimes where he’s in my head, even though he never was. But Epsilon—”

He saves her from saying it.

“Epsilon remembered him. That will do it . . . He could paint a colorful picture, I know.”

Carolina snorts, drawing her knees up to her chest, curling tight in her seat.

“Tell me about it. Sometimes I’d even dream in _his_ memories. He was in a good place, so, most of it was fine, but you could say it was . . . vivid.”

“So . . . you mean, it was fine, except when it wasn’t.”

A glance at Wash reveals more than she’d have liked to have seen. The horrible perfect stillness of his memories of Epsilon, of Alpha, of _Texas_ turning his face to stone is a signal she knows well by now. Normally, it would be her cue to allow the conversation to wander. But there’s just the hint of a purse to his lips that’s waiting and patient in nature and she doesn’t have it in her to fight the window that he’s offering her, and out more sentences come.

“it was the worst,” she admits softly, “when he thought about my mother. It's like he . . . didn’t have all the memories. Like it was second-hand to him, so he would just think of everything remotely related to her . . . Sigma included.

“Wash. You _do_ know about my mother?” _About me?_

 _How could he not, after Epsilon?_ But the palpable fear is there that he doesn’t, that he never really understood what it was she’d almost done. That he wouldn’t forgive her for it. She waits for his reply with her breath held, beating against her throat for release.

“He showed me, too,” he says after a beat.

“And my father, then? You know . . .” _That we are here together, right now, because I demanded you help me kill my dad._

Wash doesn’t _shrug._ It’s nothing so dismissive or noncommittal as that. But he inclines his head in an inoffensive and quite way that says any significance this knowledge held for him faded too long ago to warrant any grander gesture.

“Yeah,” he tells her. “But I couldn’t say I blamed you.”

“. . . Maybe you should. I really did want him dead, Wash. I wanted to kill him myself.” The confession a whisper.

He shakes his head.

“But you didn’t.”

“Does that _matter?_ ”

“That’s up to you. The only person who gets to have an opinion on that is you, Carolina. But for what it’s worth, I don’t think you should hold it against yourself.” _“I don’t.”_ He doesn’t say that part out loud, but she can hear it all the same.

“Why shouldn’t I?” _Why don’t you?_

“Because you deserve to be forgiven as much or more than anyone I’ve ever met.”

“By who? Everyone I wronged is _dead._ ”

Wash shakes his again.

“By _yourself._ ”

\--

They don’t talk about these heavy conversations in the mornings after they occur. They belong to the night and to wandering, tired minds, to hesitantly reopened cracked hearts. But she carries all his words with her, close to her chest, even when they’re never to be repeated.


End file.
